An area man who is identified simply as The Woodsman has been quietly delivering firewood to those in need, but now his truck has broken down beyond repair. The man who would drop everything to provide heat to the community needs help.
The Woodsman — he has requested anonymity — moved east from Los Angeles to the Woodstock area three years ago to care for his mother, who had cancer. In LA, he had been a film and TV director, writer and producer. He still gets residuals from his earlier work.
A woodstand he had stocked operated on the honor system, and his mother donated the proceeds to charity.
He soon noticed bundles began to disappear.
“Sometimes, I went away for a couple of weeks, and I really stacked it up with about 12 bundles,” he said. “I came back and they were almost all gone. And I looked in the box, and there wasn’t anything in there.”
On the suggestion of a local farmer, The Woodsman put up a sign asking people needing wood to heat their homes not just to take the wood, but to ask, and he’d deliver some.
During the big ice storm in February 2022, Phoenicia Library director Liz Potter told him about a couple who had no heat.
“So I just split a bunch of wood at my mom’s yard and I just brought it there, and then just sort of dumped it off,” The Woodsman said. “And I found out later that they were out of wood. They were cold, and they were upstairs, an elderly couple, and then the woman had cancer, and she was struggling to survive. I guess they heard the sound of the wood hitting the gravel, and, and then he came down and we stacked it up and they had heat.”
Broad-shouldered and muscular, The Woodsman wore shaded glasses and arrived on a motorcycle to meet at a local coffee shop. His hands displayed a familiarity with manual labor, His voice was low and calm as he explained the situation.
It seemed to The Woodsman that triage was a simple but effective way to approach the problem of a dearth of cut wood for winter heating. He has responded to the need. “It doesn’t solve the problem, but it offers an immediate solution.” he explained.
What The Woodsman has done has brought him international attention. A January 10 story in The Guardian by David Wallis suggested the reader think of The Woodsman as a cross between Paul Bunyan and Banksy.
“Many people are suffering. So many more than I had thought,” The Woodsman told Wallis. “Quietly, just secretly, really suffering.” He thinks of winter heat as a human right
How the business grew
Hollie Ferrara, the children’s librarian at the Woodstock Library, got involved.
“So it sort of just built on itself, and then the relationship with Liz, and her outreach and Hollie’s outreach, because I think that librarians are connected with the community more than anyone I’ve seen,” The Woodsman said. “There was another person and that elder, elderly woman that Holly alerted me to, she was living up in Shady, and they were delivering library books to people who can’t get out.”
People with medical challenges are often trapped in their homes. They don’t have a way to plow out their driveways. Everyone had special needs unique to them, The Woodsman noted. “I noticed at that time that you have to kind of customize the wood. You can’t just do the typical 16-inch firewood pieces in the size that you would normally do,”
The woman in Shady couldn’t lift that size of wood, so The Woodsman split them and cut them into smaller halves for her, He stacked the pieces right next to the house. “But it was still an effort for her to do it to use,” he said. “She was pretty frail.”
The Woodsman noticed most people were too proud to ask for a second delivery, so he checked to see who was getting low.
“It just kind of grew from that,” he explained. “And with the help of Hollie and Liz, because they get the word out to people who aren’t necessarily connected with our messaging on the Internet. We’ve done flyers that we’ve hung and tried every way because outreach is always a challenge, in terms of finding these people who are sort of quietly suffering in the cold. So, it’s been a good system. We all work well together.”
Since the truck died
Most of the contact goes through the Phoenicia and Woodstock libraries and he was originally serving the Kingston, Saugerties and Woodstock area.
“We’ve never said no to anyone regardless of how far down they are, how far up, or how far that way. It’s pretty wide open how far I’ll go,” he said.
While Liz and Hollie do the networking, The Woodsman cuts, splits and delivers the wood by himself.
Since his truck broke down, a couple of people have driven him to some deliveries. Others have lent him their trucks for the occasional emergency delivery. For the most part, however, he is at a standstill until he can get a replacement truck.
“It’s really hurt the operation since the truck died, because there’s so much prep involved, and I’m already getting behind on next year’” he said. “Because when I’m not delivering wood, I’m splitting wood and stacking it and getting it to season for a year, because you’ve got to stay at least a year ahead.”
Woodstock’s Woodsman uses his mother’s property to cut and split wood. He has outpost properties where owners needed trees cut and removed. They let him keep the wood there until he can move it.
Chainsaw maker Husqvarna donated two large saws and enough oil to likely last a lifetime.
Ferrara organized a GoFundMe crowdfunding campaign
(https://www.gofundme.com/f/an-emergency-firewood-program-needs-a-used-truck) to purchase a quality used truck. The campaign has raised $22,822 of the $29,000 needed.
Finding a used truck with all the right specifications is easier said than done.
“Recently we found one that ticked every single box. It had the horsepower, it had the bed length, it had the dump body, it had a toolbox,” Ferrara reported. “And it had structural issues. So it’s been like chasing the magical unicorn of finding the right truck at the right price locally, because we looked at a truck in Connecticut, and it raised too many questions about transporting it and crossing state lines. There were just too many red flags.”
Ferrara has been putting the word out through Radio Kingston and WDST. She has asked the town government whether it had any surplus trucks for sale. No truck luck there.
Sawyer Motors was willing to sell them a truck at cost, but it didn’t have enough horsepower to haul the heavy firewood loads.
Anyone with leads on a truck can contact Ferrara at the Woodstock Library at 845-679-2213 or Potter at the Phoenicia Library at 845-688-7811.
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